On translating Rilke’s Duineser Elegien

By translating the Duino Elegies, we have found that the words, like doors, are less statements about something than invitations into an expanding architecture. As we have lingered with the words, translating has offered a wonderful entrance into the Elegies’ shifting world, in which, Rilke said, “the eternal thing … possess[es] the unheard of, unsurpassable intensity of … inner equivalents.” How to begin to translate this world?

 -- from Leonore Hildebrandt & Tony Brinkley's translators' note in the Spring 2011 issue of Cerise Press